Donald Trump is a challenge, Alexander Boldizar admits.
“Trump has totally messed up satire,” Boldizar says, shaking his head. “Every once in a while, I think: ‘Is he just a very, very funny guy?’”
Boldizar, a North Vancouver resident, recovering lawyer, and award-winning author, is planning to provide tips and tricks on writing effective satire at a Nov. 8 workshop. It’s a subject that’s complicated by today’s political climate, he says.
“There are news stories that read like satire and satire stories that are completely plausible.”
But while Trump may be afflicted with what documentarian Erroll Morris termed: Irony Deficit Disorder, his administration is ultimately a boon to satirists, Boldizar argues.
“In the long run, authoritarian regimes are always good for satire.”
It’s the reason magical realism flowered amid Latin American dictatorships and the reason many Eastern Europeans had a hunger for satire, Boldizar says. It comes down to Finley Peter Dunne’s famous advice to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
“As long as you’re afflicting someone in power, the meanness is OK,” Boldizar says. “And mean humour is always funnier.”
Born in what is now the Slovak Republic, Boldizar arrived in Canada when he was eight years old.
An omnivorous reader of adventure and science fiction, Boldizar recalls being drafted into a gifted class while going to school in Ottawa.
Instead of an academic all-star team, the gifted class seemed like a way station for aspiring comedians.
“It became a competition of who could be funniest,” he recalls.
And in that competition, Boldizar was starting out at the bottom.
He would crack jokes, make wry observations, or suggest something irreverent, only to be greeted with silence. Boldizar remembers surveying the room, looking for a smile, a chuckle, a crack in the deadpan expressions of his classmates.
Years later, one of those classmates confessed to a conspiracy. They had all decided they would never laugh at Boldizar’s jokes.
“It was an ongoing gag,” he says.
But that wall of silence made Boldizar get more interested in humour as he tried to find out just what made a good joke.
A key was material the audience can relate to. The class clown jokes about teachers and cheerleaders. The class nerd jokes about “obscure factoids,” Boldizar explains.
“As you get more and more obscure, the humour might get more sophisticated but you’re losing more and more audience,” he says.
However, there’s also a risk that comes with common reference points, Boldizar cautions: the comedic cliché.
“Cliché kills humour.”
In telling a joke, the setup is the zig and the payoff is the zag, he says.
“If you’ve seen zig-zig-zag in that pattern often enough, the standard zag just doesn’t do it for you anymore. You need higher and higher doses of zag.”
The education in comedy suited him well. Boldizar was first published in McGill’s Red Herring. More recently, he married satire with a critique of the law in his novel The Ugly.
“Satire requires a skewed perspective, or at least some kind of gap between the way most people see the world – or the way we lie to ourselves that we see the world – and a completely different perspective,” he says. “The bigger the gap, the more humour – as long as people can follow it.”
A key aspect of satire is its relative edginess. Comedy is tragedy plus time or distance, he explains.
“The edgier the comedy, the less time and distance you have,” he says. “If you want to be edgy, you have to walk up to the line, but you don’t really know where the line is until you’ve stepped over it.”
Boldizar is scheduled to help writers find that line beginning at 7 p.m. at the North Vancouver City Library at 120 West 14th St. Registration is required. Visit nvcl.ca for info.
